There are several prior art joint arrangements which may be utilized to join composite materials such as the skin of an aircraft. One such type joint is the scarf joint wherein the skin is highly tapered, and sandwiched between the splice plates which are also highly tapered. Although it would be expected that the scarf joint is one of the better joints, in actuality it has been shown to be the weakest joint, as well as the most difficult to manufacture and assemble. The scarf joint fails, basically because the thickness of the tapered skin is reduced below nominal before the first fastener station is reached in a multi-bolt fastener arrangement. This results in a failure of the skin in the thin section, and a premature failure of the joint.
Another common type of prior art joint used in joining composite materials is the standard uniformly thick skin structure, sandwiched between uniformly thick splice plates. Although this joint arrangement is superior to that of the scarf joint arrangement, it has a weakness in that the joint strength at certain of the critical bolt locations is limited by the bearing bypass envelope. This means that due to the uniform thickness of the skin and splice plates, a high load transfer coincident with a high bypass stress causes premature joint failure.